The Whitsun Weddings

On the train with Philip Larkin

Photo by rossella porta on Unsplash

Dear Reader

As I am travelling and unable to write a new essay, I am re-posting an essay from November last year. This essay, which coincidentally is about travelling, was originally sent to 138 subscribers. I’ve been lucky enough to see more than a thousand of you entering the English Republic of Letters since then, so most of you won’t have seen it the first time around. I hope the hardy stalwarts who have been with me since last November, and to whom I owe an enduring debt of gratitude for your support since those early days, will forgive the repetition.

Your comments are very welcome, as always.

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This week the English Republic is taking the train. Following the road trip from hell that we took in “La autopista del sur” in company with Julio Cortázar a few weeks ago, I was challenged in the nicest possible way by that brilliant Substackian,

Mr. Troy Ford

to try the same kind of experimental essay with a poem. So I turned to Philip Larkin, English curmudgeon, one of the most admired British poets from the second half of the 20th and one of my favourite writers. The poem I’ve chosen is “The Whitsun Weddings”. It was written in 1958, first published in 1959, and is regarded as one of his finest works.

I first read Larkin's poetry at school. I bought the "The Whitsun Weddings" just before I went to university, a period in my life I touch on below. I was developing a strong interest in poetry and, with a few pounds in my pocket from my summer job, I wandered into Foyles on Charing Cross Road and bought the collection from which this poem comes. It was a slim volume that accompanied me later in Spain, Ecuador and beyond; however, at some point in a later voyage, it got mislaid and I now read it in my volume of Larkin’s Collected Poems.

So the poem, if not the book, has been with me a long time, and I realise its importance has grown for me over the years. Writing this essay helped me see some connections between it and my life that had remained hidden.

Nowhere does a life find better meaning than between the lines of a poem. When life is transient, the poem offers a place from which to muse, gain perspective and even relax in the moment, regardless of where in the world we may be.

Put another way, as I mentioned in a recent post on Don Quixote and ballet, literature is one of the ways I try to make sense of the world. Don Quixote saw giants where others saw windmills. I - through Larkin (and Pope) - see wheat fields in London.

I suggest you read the poem before my essay. My piece is not intended as an analysis of the whole poem, and if you want to read one, I suggest you read this. (And if you want to read about another Larkin poem on Substack, there's no better place to head than

Garth Greenwell

’s excellent essay on “High Windows”.)

What follows is a four-stranded, eight-part essay. The strands are:

a) Selected lines from the poem;

b) My critical commentary on those lines;

c) Reflections on Larkin’s life and wider work inspired by the above;

d) Thoughts on my own life and circumstances in relation to the above.

So here goes. Join me on a journey of discovery, about the poem, about Larkin, about ourselves. All aboard...and feel free bring a packed lunch.

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1.

a) That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

b) I love the repeated t-sounds (I count 11 of them), the way they imitate the train starting out in a leisurely, almost hesitant, and stuttering way. I am also curious about Larkin giving the time as being "about 1.20", a time which already feels quite specific for a lyric poem. Why emphasise the “about”? A bit of a dig at the train’s late running, perhaps?

c) Larkin lived in Hull for much of his adult life, where he worked in the university as a librarian (he eventually became “the Librarian”). The city is in the north of England, and he wrote somewhere that the city in those days had very poor train connections with London, which for him was a mercy, as it prevented “American critics” (sorry), from visiting him. “I like [Hull] because it is so far from everywhere else” he told The Observer, an English newspaper, in a rare interview in 1979. I also wonder about the stuttering language at the start of the poem in light of the fact that Larkin stammered until well into adult life. Was this playing an unconscious part in his writing? 

d) The Whitsun holiday at the beginning of May (now prosaically known as Early May bank holiday), an important date in the religious calendar, was also the time for making grass silage on the Devon farm I grew up on. If you like the smell of cut grass, as I do, this was the ultimate high, with tons of the stuff being piled into trailers and then dumped into a huge pit all day. Larkin doesn’t mention silage on the “wide farms” that the train runs past, but what he does do is describe Saturday afternoons very well, with all their energy and many possibilities. In my childhood and beyond, Saturday afternoon were the best parts of the week. It might be about playing or watching sport. Or later, trips to a gallery. Or a wintry tramp in the park. Or a matinee play, with an easy slide into drinks and then dinner. Or, last year, with my mother during her last summer, we’d sometimes hear the sound of light aircraft sputtering above us in the powder blue sky. Those sunlit Saturdays will be with me always. 

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2. 

a) Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense   

Of being in a hurry gone. 

b) These lines follow straight on from the ones I quoted above. The delay of the train suggested above is emphasised by its syntactically late entry into the poem (I have exaggerated the effect by cutting the line where I did). The phrase “all windows down, all cushions hot” keeps the poem shuddering along here, like the departing train. The “o” sounds that predominate in this line suggest the gently accelerating wheels of the train. There’s also, oddly, and a bit prematurely (!), given the ending of the poem, a sense of postcoital bliss here. 

c) There's an anecdote Larkin tells somewhere of a journey he took by train when he was a very young man. It was a long journey, and as he sat and read and looked out the window, hunger crept up on him. He had a sandwich in his bag. But there were other people facing him in the railway carriage, and Larkin, who described himself as a shy young man, felt too embarrassed to eat in front of them. So he stayed hungry and arrived famished. How very English, I hear you say...

d) The palpable sense of relief of getting onto the train and not having to worry about the journey, “all hurry gone”, is one I have often felt (though with British trains, there's always a significant risk that something will go awry at some point). Larkin probably took a train when he started at Oxford. I certainly took one when I started at the same university. It was hardly stress free. In those days, you took a trunk (mine was from a local junk shop) stuffed with all your worldly goods, ready for your new life. But it was only with difficulty that I hauled it onto the train. Things got worse after that. When I got to Reading station, where I needed to change, I found I had to lug the trunk through half a mile of tunnels before climbing up a full flight of steps. I got to my platform just in time to catch my train. So much for “all sense/Of being in a hurry gone”. I arrived at my destination sweaty, dishevelled and exhausted. I felt like I’d done a day’s work on the family farm I grew up on. Not how I’d imagined the start of my university days. 

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3.

a) All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept   

  For miles inland,

A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.   

b) The poem: In these deliciously languid lines there are echoes of Edward Thomas’ famous train station poem, ‘Adlestrop’. In this fragment, Larkin employs very literary and self conscious syntax, avoiding usual English word order by having the verb come at the end of “a slow and stopping curve southward we kept.” I’d like to call this meandering with intent. And also with ident: the indentation of “For miles Inland” is a neat way of enhancing the meaning of the line.

c) Larkin loved music, especially jazz (he had very strong views on the latter¹), and his poetry is often sonorous and even musical; but he was against verse written to be read. He valued above all the effect of a poem on the page. In an interview with the Paris Review in 1982 (he died in 1985), he said, “hearing a poem as opposed to reading it on the page, means you miss so much - the shape, the punctuation, the italics...” I’ve just mentioned a good example of what he meant - the indentation of the line “for miles inland”. As for Edward Thomas, Larkin was certainly familiar with his work and I think he might have been influenced by him. If you look at the ending of a poem like ‘Adlestrop’ and the way Larkin likes to pan out his focus at the end of his poems towards something “serene” and “indefinable” - to use Alan Brownjohn’s words - you can see similar effects being created. One other link between them is this: in the Listener magazine in 1970, Larkin wrote of Thomas as “not one who chooses to commemorate or celebrate a war, but one who reacts against having a war thrust upon him.” To me, this sounds a lot like Larkin’s attitude towards work in his well-known poem on the subject, “Toads”. 

d) These lines evoke for me childhood summers on the farm in England; hay, skylarks, stillness, tall clouds (though usually without much heat). They take me back to the ‘slow and stopping curve’ of school holidays spent on the farm, with its dusty lanes, darkening beech leaves, and, so often, the threat of rain. The smell of raindrops on the parched clay soils of mid-Devon was wonderful, but, unlike the railway traveller gently contemplating the landscape, the weather for the farmer was more than an incidental detail. If the hay was still waiting to be bailed up when the tall clouds produced rain, then they’d also provoke towering, frustrated rage on the part of my father. Life on the farm was not all about serene reflection on the passing seasons. 

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4. 

a) We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls   

In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,   

All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

As if out on the end of an event

Waving goodbye

To something that survived it. 

b) Here we get to the wedding parties and the people attending them. It is here that Larkin teeters on the brink of social satire, as he spots the “pomaded...girls/in  parodies of fashion.” However, he rejected the label: “To be a satirist, you have to think you know better than everyone else. I’ve never done that.” And indeed, it’s hard to see him here as setting himself up here as an expert on fashion trends of the time. While the weddings seem to be presented in a partly comic light in the poem, I’d agree with Alan Brownjohn, who finds Larkin demonstrating in this poem - and elsewhere - “tentative yet real tribute to the validity of some human rituals”². In this case, the sentiment seems to be expressed in the words “something that survived it”. 

c) By his own admission, Larkin didn’t get out much. So to find him indulging in people watching while sitting in his railway carriage, in safe anonymity, is to see him in his element. He was an acute observer of English life, occasionally provocative - “books are a load of crap” - but more often, he was a poet who showed more interest in the gaps in existence than in its lived plenitude: “Nothing, like something, happens anywhere”³. The phrase in this fragment, “as if out on the end of an event,” could be used as a guide to locating Larkin in relation to the world around him. 

d) The last few years have been a time of ‘human rituals’ for me and my wider family - a time of funerals, weddings, births. I confess don’t enjoy weddings and avoid them if I can. At my first wedding, my father collapsed and that seems to have set the tone for the misfortunes that always seem to occur when I attend one. I even started to believe that I was a bad omen for couples after two weddings I went to in rapid succession soon resulted in divorces. So not accepting an invitation became an act of generosity...but the real truth was - is - that weddings unsettle me. The new beginnings and remaking of social arrangements cast a shadow on the old ones, while, in turn, the remembrance of past failures lurks in the space between the lurching dancers, the embarrassed speakers and those pomaded girls. 

5. 

a) Yes, from cafés

And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed   

Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days   

Were coming to an end. All down the line

Fresh couples climbed aboard: 

b) This sudden blaze of hyphenated establishments sets the poem firmly in metonymic mode (spoiler: the poem will end on an ambitious metaphor), as these venues and their paraphernalia (“bunting”⁴) are gloried over in all their cultural and geographical specificity. They’re far from fancy places, but these venues suggest that a holiday mood reigns, merriment spills over (“annexes”), and improvisation (“up yards”) is required. Again, this doesn’t feel like satire, but rather like a celebration of a carnival-like atmosphere taking over the country on wedding days. The “yes” is affirmative: it’s perhaps as happy as Larkin gets in a poem.

c) He was the poet of inglorious locations, shunning the glamour of London. He wrote about hospitals, office blocks, station hotels and the “raw estates” in small towns. He was Britain’s poet-in-residence for nowhere in particular, a spokesperson for Everytown. Whereas Shelley famously called poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world," Larkin, who once claimed that “deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth,'' was more like an anonymous member of the local council. 

d)  Everywhere is a venue these days. But Larkin’s “coach-party annexes” take me back to the small holiday hotel run by my brothers and sisters-in-law, where I would help out in my student days. On Saturday afternoons, right through the season (April to October), a coach full of elders would arrive, just like hundreds of others in that Devon seaside town. From Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire or Lancashire, they would come year after year, confident of a warm welcome and looking forward to the chance to sing old songs together in the hotel bar, while taking a break from solitude and fending for themselves. I don't know any of them read his work, but it was their lives that Larkin wrote about; it was their - our - ordinary lives he chronicled; he wrote about us, “the poorer born/whose baser stars shut us up in wishes”⁵. This is one of the reasons I read him. 

6. 

a) The women shared

The secret like a happy funeral;

While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared   

At a religious wounding. Free at last,

And loaded with the sum of all they saw,

We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.   

b) Here, death and marriage are brought explicitly together as human rituals. The gripping of handbags while witness to a “religious wounding” brings together the sacred and the profane in a way not untypical for Larkin (it happens in a different way, for example, in ‘An Arundel Tomb)’. The slow and awed contemplation of “religious wounding” where the multisyllables slows the poem down momentarily, while we pause to think of what the wounding might consist of, is suddenly interrupted by the sharp breaking away of “free at last”, as we are now catapulted towards the end of the poem. “Loaded” anticipates the end of the poem, particularly the word “swelled” in the third line from the end. And not only is the train loaded with the passengers containing all they have seen, but we as readers are now also freighted with these observations. The poem is suggesting how it could be read, encouraging us to interpret the ending explicitly in terms of the “fresh couples” who have left their wedding guests behind. 

c) Larkin never married and told the Paris Review “I’ve stayed single by choice”. In his Observer interview, he is a little more expansive on the subject: “I often wonder why people get married. I think perhaps they dislike being alone more than I do”. It is perhaps ironic therefore that one of his most famous poems is about people getting married. 

d) The phrase “free at last” seems to belong to a boy's adventure story and yet could mean many things. It could apply to weddings, as a means of leaving the confines of childhood and family to find one’s own way. Of course, it could apply to divorces, and, more sadly, to funerals. But for me, thinking of this journey to London, it reminds me of the first time I lived in London on my own, for one summer before university. London was a freedom from the usual rules, freedom from the people I knew, freedom from the person I had been. That first summer was full of poetry; I was reading MacNeice, Plath, Hughes and Dylan Thomas, and discovering poets like James Wright and Robert Bly. And of course, Larkin. It was a summer full of warm days reading in the parks with new friends; it was a summer of tourists gawking at a “fairy tale” royal marriage and it was the summer after the the Brixton riots, which smouldered on. There were till police sirens, cars on fire, a divided city. For a moment, you felt change might be in the air. But by August, all you could smell was the smoke of hope being extinguished. The summer ended, the tourists went their way and I realised I’d learned nothing from freedom. I simply hadn’t known what to do with it. 

7. 

a) I thought of London spread out in the sun,   

Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

b) This is one of Larkin’s most dazzling metaphors. When challenged by his Paris Review interviewer, who’d quoted a critic complaining that the image “reduced England to squares of wheat,” Larkin immediately pounced on the error. He pointed out that the image was about London. And then continued, “it doesn’t seem ‘diminutional⁶’ to me, rather the reverse, if anything. It’s meant to make the postal districts seem rich and fruitful.” Poets can’t always be taken at their word on such matters, and in any case we are free to disagree. However, I love this image, finding it startling and uplifting, and the cadence of the line is beautiful. 

c) Larkin never lived in London and was always a visitor, even an outsider there. Asked about his relationship with the “contemporary literary community”, Larkin told his interviewer that as he didn’t write for a living and didn’t live in London, his relationship with that community was limited but amicable. This all seemed a huge relief to Larkin, who appeared to have little use either for the community or London. He disliked the theatre and rarely socialised beyond a limited number of friends. He had no public or political ambitions. Unlike another famous English curmudgeon, William Cobbett, he probably didn’t hate the “Great Wen” of London. But he seems to have felt no love for it either. 

d) As a boy and then a young man travelling up from the countryside, I used to feel some trepidation as the train approached Paddington, the station that connects London with the south west of England. After my first summer there, I began to think fondly of the parks in London, when everyone spreads out in the sun the moment it comes out. But Larkin’s outrageous image also used to make me think of Alexander Pope’s lines (which may or may not have been in Larkin’s head):

Another age shall see the golden ear

Embrown the slope, and nod on the parterre,

Deep harvests bury all his pride has plann'd,

And laughing Ceres reassume the land.⁷

This passage astounds me even more than Larkin’s wild metaphor; the most famous poet of the Augustan Age of reason, Pope, madly envisages the overturning of the corruption of London - Cobbett’s Great Wen - through a restoration of a kind of pastoral paradise; fields full of wheat. The part of me which has always remained a farmer's son (and a Cobbett fan) finds that a comforting image. 

8. 

a) There we were aimed…

We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower   

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

b) Here Larkin channels his inner John Milton with a line that could come straight out of ‘Paradise Lost’: “There we were aimed.” This also introduces the image of the train as a bow with its quiver of arrows ready to be fired into the sky over London. The moment of release along with its sense of falling suggests an ejaculation, which in turn fits with the wedding day theme with the imminent consummation of so many marriages. But it’s also a classic Larkin ending, gesturing towards some kind of vatic utterance beyond the ostensible topic of the poem. 

c) Larkin had a reputation as a pessimist, yet some of his best poems end with this kind of upward surge of energy. The move here is from close observation and light social commentary to something you could almost describe as grandeur. Asked once what he was trying to preserve in his poetry, Larkin replied, “the experience. The beauty.” 

d) For years, as the brakes tightened and screeched on the train arriving at Paddington, I would wince at the sudden scurrying that took place around me as other passengers rushed to get out of the train and onto the platform. Then would come the unsettling rush through the crowds to get on the Underground or catch a bus. It was the entry into the frantic world of the city, the Great Wen ready to envelope me. But in recent years, I’d try to slow things down and first walk into Hyde Park near Paddington, easing my way into the city. I found that strolling through a London park -  Richmond, Regent’s, Hampstead Heath or even the wonderful Margravine Cemetery, kicking the leaves or watching the tall clouds turn to rain, is one of the joys of being in the city. But that has also changed. I used Paddington station for over forty years to travel between my parents’ house and London. Now my parents are dead and that house has been sold. My brothers’ hotel was demolished years ago and the haymaking and dusty summers on the family farm are all long gone. It’s late autumn, with its own “sense of falling,” and I can feel my old route to freedom, surrounded by the bare November fields, closing forever.  

1. “Charlie Parker wrecked jazz", he once said, not exactly sitting on the fence. Parker was one of the “3 Ps” that represented everything Larkin didn’t like about modern art: the other two were Ezra Pound and Pablo Picasso.

2. "Larkin" in the series 'Writers and their work', Longman, 1975

3. From: I Remember, I Remember'.

4. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, this is "a lightweight loosely woven fabric used chiefly for flags" and festive decorations. It's a word we use a lot in Britain, a country addicted to quaint pageantry. But Basil Bunting is also the name of the poet who, to Larkin’s apparent glee, was more bothered by the visits of critics than he was, because Bunting lived in Newcastle, which had better train connections to London than Hull, where Larkin lived). I don't know for sure, but as Bunting was a modernist, it's unlikely that Larkin was a fan. 

5. This is from Shakespeare's "All's Well That Ends Well" I.1 179-80). The speaker, Helena, is not poor. She is the daughter of a famous physician. The point she is making is that she doesn't belong to the gilded elites, for whom all doors open.

6. This was the ugly term used by the critic

7. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44894/epistles-to-several-persons-epistle-iv